Related News/Archive

The Death Penalty Information Center's report says only nine states executed prisoners this year. Texas, with 15, executed the most defendants. Florida executed three.

However, Florida far exceeded other states in new death sentences: 21 defendants were sentenced to die in Florida through mid December, the report says. That's more than twice Texas' figure for the comparable period. California, with 14 death sentences, was the only other state to reach double digits.

Overall, the report found that death-penalty use in 2012 "continued to decline, with fewer states endorsing capital punishment, relatively few death sentences being imposed, and executions being carried out at only half the rate of the late 1990s."

Richard Dieter, the group's executive director, said that the majority of new death-penalty cases in 2012 were in a small minority of states, with Florida, California, Texas and Pennsylvania accounting for 65 percent of new death sentences.

Often, he said, the inception of those cases is even more local, with prosecutors in individual jurisdictions contributing larger quantities of death-penalty cases. For example, several of Florida's new death cases in 2012 came from Duval County, the center's research shows.

"That's reflective of the philosophical position … of the prosecutor about how to proceed, and what's the threshold for a death-penalty case," Dieter said.